Month: September 2012

Here are a few product reviews posted this week from other blogs we follow.

JD’s started the crazy bacon product trend with their Bacon Salt and Baconnaise, and now they released sriracha popcorn. Is sriracha the next bacon? If so, when will we see sriracha bacon? (via Junk Food Guy)

I don’t think these will fully cover my nipples in a wardrobe emergency. That’s what they’re for, right? (via Candyblog)

Here are some new products found on store shelves by us and your fellow readers. We may or may not review them, but we’d like to let you know what new items are popping up. We’ll also occasionally throw in an unusual product.

Ben & Jerry’s Key Lime Pie ice cream is back, baby! Let’s celebrate with cake…and only cake. It’s a limited batch, so I suggest you buy a second freezer and fill it with nothing but pints of it. That should last you until it comes back again. You can read Ben & Jerry’s Key Lime Pie ice cream reviews here, here, here, here, and here.

There’s microwaveable mac and cheese in a cup so it makes sense to have microwaveable mashed potatoes in a cup. I could’ve sworn Stove Top made microwaveable stuffing in a cup, but, now that I think about it, I could’ve dreamt about that during my post-Thankgiving nap. Too bad because it would’ve completed the side dish trifecta.

Speaking of mac and cheese, I didn’t know Betty Crocker made mac and cheese. I wonder if it’s as radioactive orange as Kraft mac and cheese. Betty Crocker Mac and Cheese comes in three cheesy varieties: original, grilled cheese, and cheese pizza. (Thanks for the photo, Jada!)

Hormel, you are the king of microwaveable shelf-stable products. You have your Compleats, SPAM meals, and your new Sandwich Makers, which is available in Meatballs in Marinara Sauce, Chicken with Barbecue Sauce, and Seasoned Pork with Barbecue Sauce. Wait…no SPAM in barbecue sauce, Hormel? I know you have the technology and trademarks to make that happen, so make it happen. (Thanks for the photos, ED Junkie and Andrew!)

What the hell, Canada!? You folks have ketchup chips AND these Sour Cream ‘N Bacon Ruffles. It’s not fair. Not fair at all. (Thanks for the photo, Jonas!)

If you’re out shopping and see a new product on the shelf (or really unusual), snap a picture of it, email it to us at theimpulsivebuy@gmail.com with “Spotted” in the subject line, and you might see it in our next Spotted on Shelves post.

If you live in Philadelphia, it’s easy to get a decent cheesesteak. But if you live in Philadelphia, it’s a bit harder to try Jack in the Box’s new Sourdough Cheesesteak Melt since there aren’t any locations in Pennsylvania and the closest one is in West Chester, Ohio.

The new sandwich features thinly sliced steak, grilled onions, fire-roasted red and green pepper, melted cheese, and mayo onion sauce on Jack’s Sourdough bread. The Sourdough Cheesesteak Melt isn’t the first Jack in the Box cheesesteak sandwich, they made a Philly Cheesesteak in the 90s.

But your Middle Eastern counterpart has recently come up with some crazy shit. How crazy? How about a pizza with cones as the edge crust, each of which is stuffed with either cream cheese, honey mustard chicken, or chicken & cream cheese. They’ve also have Kit Kats wrapped in pizza dough. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if next month they introduced a pizza with Kit Kat stuffed crust.

Sometimes, late at night, after I’ve had a really hard day and am in the mood for a good pity party, I get on the Internet and Google “Oreo O’s.”

I don’t do it because I find the sight of ambiguously gendered marshmallow things performing synchronized swimming within milk to be aesthetically pleasing, nor do I Google the cereal because I hope to brush up on my Korean language skills. Mostly, I Google it because reading comments about how much other peoples’ lives suck now that Oreo O’s has been discontinued makes me feel better about myself.

So you can only imagine how I felt when Internet searches began yielding strange and life-changing news earlier this summer. According to the bastion of all things verifiable and trusted (Wikipedia) Oreo O’s were going to come back into stores sometime in early August.

Message board and Ask.com chatter — leaked, supposedly, from researchers in the the top secret skunkworks of cereal development known as Post — began appearing on a nightly basis, while videos were uploaded on YouTube to promote the supposed relaunch.

Yet, like that whole 2011 apocalypse deal, the date came and went, and now, nearly two months later, I’m stuck eating regular Oreo’s and regular cereal instead of cereal that tastes like Oreos.

Like I said, life sucks.

Unless you live in Korea, where Oreo O’s are not only available, but apparently making life just totally freaking awesome for anyone lucky enough to get their hands on them. Fortunately, the holy grail of childhood cereal nostalgia and lost Saturday mornings — a box of Oreo O’s — arrived on my doorstep last week.

To a certain extent, I considered myself unworthy as I picked up the blue box with writing entirely in Korean. A serious cereal eater I may consider myself, but it shames me to say I can’t exactly remember if I ever had Oreo O’s before. I probably did at some point during those developmental years known as middle school, but thanks to a diet based almost exclusively around Golden Grahams and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I really can’t remember.

While it certainly detracts from my credibility, my relatively blank slate of completely unrealistic expectations does keep me somewhat objective. At the very least, it keeps me capable of opening the box without hyperventilating and going into cardiac arrest due to sheer excitement.

That sheer excitement kicked into full gear once I opened the box and took a whiff of pure, unadulterated Oreo smell (which I was able to confirm by also opening up a snack pack of Oreos I just so happened to have on hand for testing purposes.) The speckled rings had a solid crunch and cocoa heavy flavor only bolstered by a sweeter vanilla aftertaste which comes along with each bite.

Taking a handful of the rings and chucking them into my mouth, and then stepping back to bite into my actual Oreo, it occurred to be that this might actual be the kind of cereal which civilizations are founded on. Even the marshmallows, at first thought extraneous, have a vanilla flavor not completely dissimilar to Oreo cream, with their soft bite and slightly smooth mouthfeel doing an admirable job at filling in for said Oreo cream. Heck, if I was the kind of disgusting person who chewed up my food and swooshed it around in my mouth, I might even conclude, with authority, that the partially digested Oreo O’s cereal and an actual Oreo were one and the same.

It’s at this point that I begin to develop a midbowl crisis. Realizing this may just be the best single cereal ever constructed by the wheels of food industry, it dawns on me that my life is going to suck once I get through this box and go back to having to eat Oreos and cereal separately.

I pondered moving to Korea, but luckily, the addition of milk to my bowl makes me rethink this location change. Great as it is plain, Oreo O’s is actually just above average in milk. It’s crunchier than I’d like, but mostly, it just fails to transfer its unique cookies and cream properties to the milk, making the end-milk slurp akin to a bellyflop into the kiddie pool.

Does Oreo O’s taste like Oreos? Well, not exactly, but it tastes pretty damn close, as least much closer than Cookie Crisp tastes like an actual chocolate chip cookie or Apple Jacks tastes like an apple. The ironic – and truly heartbreaking – corollary is that both Cookie Crisp and Apple Jacks will never be discontinued, allowed to perpetuate in “kinda sorta but not really” taste equivalence while Oreo O’s may never come back to these golden shores. And that is more depressing than any long, tiring day at the office will ever be.

Item: Post Oreo O’s Cereal with Marshmallows (Korea) Purchased Price: $13.98Size: 500 gramsPurchased at: eBayRating: 10 out of 10 Pros: Tastes remarkably like an actual Oreo. Rings have good cocoa flavor and stay crunchy in milk. Chewed up and swooshed around in your mouth, might just be identical to an Oreo (hypothetically speaking) Presumably healthier for me than an actual Oreo. Bridging the cultural gap one one cereal bowl at a time. Cons: Unverifiable internet rumors that ruin peoples’ lives. Ambiguously gendered white things. Not available in America. Leaves average end-milk. Bellyflopping into the kiddie pool. Feeling crappier about myself than I did before. Not for twisters.